Precourt on Mir Clutter

Speaking after the STS-91 mission, he says, "There [are] still food supplies
there that belonged to Shannon [Lucid] and John Blaha, and there are boxes with their names on them that nobody's ever going to eat..."

Precourt also comments that the Russians had "lost control of inventory management,
which is very easy to do... [It's like] when you've got stuff that's been thrown
in your garage for twelve years and then you go back through and clean your
garage and find, 'Oh, I haven't seen this in years. Where did this come from?'
Well, that is literally the way it is, too, in every module up there..."

Precourt continues, "They really have a situation where the inventory management
got out of control, and [Russian program manager Valery] Ryumin thinks it happened
at about the three-year point, and the crews have been struggling since then.
The lesson, of course, [which Ryumin] tried to pound home, was that we'd better
do something a lot different for ISS [the International Space Station] or we're
going to see the same kinds of problems. So we're struggling with that, and
we keep working on it."